Albina Shagimuratova

Soprano

Born in Tashkent and started music lessons at the age of five. In 1994 she enrolled at Kazan Music College specializing in choral conducting. From 1998-2001 she studied at the Kazan N.G. Zhiganov State Conservatoire in the choral conducting and opera singing departments.

In 2001 she enrolled at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky State Conservatoire (Galina Pisarenko’s class), and then completed her post-graduate studies there (2007).

In 2004, Ms. Shagimuratova became a member of the K. S. Stanislavsky and V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theater. She has sung the Swan in The Tale of Tsar Sultan and the Queen of Shemakha in The Golden Cockerel of Rimsky-Korsakov. Since 2008 she has been a soloist with Tatar State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre.

From 2006-2008 she perfected her skills at the Youth Opera Studio attached to the Houston Grand Opera, where she sang the roles of Musetta (La Boheme), Lucia (Lucia di Lammermoor), Gilda (Rigoletto) and Violetta (La Traviata).

Her European debut was at the Salzburg Festival where she sang The Queen of the Night in Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte in 2008 (conductor Riccardo Muti). In the 2008/09 season she also sang the Queen of the Night at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and Los Angeles Opera. She made her role and company debut as Gilda in Rigoletto at Palm Beach Opera.

Highlights of the 2009/10 season included her Metropolitan Opera debut as the Queen of the Night in Julie Taymor’s production of Die Zauberflöte — a role she also performed at Deutsche Oper amRhein. She made her Boston Symphony debut under the baton of Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos in Rossini’s Stabat Mater, and made her New York debut as Flaminia in Haydn’s rarely-performed Il Mondo della Luna with Gotham Chamber Opera, in a new production by Diane Paulus at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium.

During the 2010/2011 season, Albina Shagimuratova debuted at LaScala as the Queen of the Night in a new production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, directed and designed by William Kentridge and conducted by Roland Böer. She also sang the Queen of the Night for her debut at Staatsoper Hamburg in a production directed and designed by Achim Freyer, and at the Wiener Staatsoper under the baton of Ivor Bolton. Her concert calendar included Mozart’s Requiem with Zubin Mehta at Maggio Musicale in Florence.

In the 2011/12 season she sang the Queen of the Night at the Wiener Staatsoper and the Gran Teatro del Liceu and Lucia di Lammermoor at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

Her extensive orchestral experience includes being a soloist in the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini and Fauré. In 2005, she sang Mozart’s Requiem in the opening concert of the famed December Nights of Sviatoslav Richter in Moscow. She has also sung the Beethoven Ninth Symphony and Mahler Eighth Symphony with the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra there under Vladimir Fedoseyev. She has appeared with the outstanding conductors Riccardo Muti, James Conlon, Patrick Summers, Peter Schneider, Adam Fischer, Vladimir Spivakov and others.

In 2010 she made her Bolshoi Theatre debut in the part of Queen of the Night. In 2011 she took part in the production of Ruslan and Lyudmila, singing the part of Lyudmila (conductor Vladimir Jurowski, director Dmitri Tcherniakov).